Aura, on Bluesky, posted:
given no one in this thread can even agree what an "immersive sim" is except "it's made by someone who worked on deus ex or system shock", I feel like it's time you all got together and made a Berlin Interpretation to get pissed off about for the next 20 years
Okay, sure.
So here’s one approach to genre, heavily influenced by the way Borde and Chaumeton originally sought to define film noir1.
We start with a corpus of works that are near universally agreed to fit within a genre; we then identify their commonalities. We define a genre ultimately not through some ‘if this then that’ predicate but as a fuzzy cluster of works that are featurally related. We insert some (subjective) critical judgement in trying to grasp the thematic core that unifies these works and from which these individual characteristics stem.
In the end, we view the genre as having a ‘core’ made up of that definitive canon, but also a ‘mantle’ of more diverse works, and a ‘crust’ of genre blends, sub genres, and variants. It is true that games may or may not have the immersive sim nature; but it is also true that some games have it more than others.
I'm also not going to litigate whether the term "immersive sim" is a good one, semantically. It's just a historical term attached to a particular canon of games, from which I'm trying to divine commonalities and lines of design thinking. My definition doesn't make any references to concepts of "immersion" or "simulation", because I don't actually think they're useful to understanding immersive sims!
1: The Core
Everything stems from our choice of what that canon is. The goal is not to be exhaustive; the goal is to include a good sized set of works that embody the genre. My list is:
- Thief
- Thief 2
- System Shock
- System Shock 2
- Deus Ex
- Dishonored
- Prey
That’s a pretty short list, with some deliberate omission.2 It’s also notable that all these games are the work of very few studios that are all related in some way.
What, then, generally unites these games? Here’s a list of morphological and ludic commonalities:
- First-person camera perspective.
- Linear, level-based structure with authored (not procedural) scenarios.
- Individual levels have an open structure that allows for varying routes and approaches; levels as spaces for the player to pursue goals, not gauntlets of challenges arranged sequentially.
- Combat and stealth are both present if not coequal options.
- Embodiment and physicality – ie being able to see the player chatacter model and affordances like mantling, crouching, going prone, leaning.
- ‘Systemic interaction”. Things that obey rules and act on their own independently of the player, allowing for emergent behavior, chains of cause and effect.
- Use of the environment or scenario to the player's advantage; assess-then-exploit play.
- Wide gamut of player affordances that interact with those systems in different ways or empower the player to manipulate scenarios in creative ways.
- Resource management as a limiting factor in those affordances, usually with resources scattered throughout the environment.
- Complex NPC or enemy behaviors, often around player stealth.
- Thematically, these games generally posit the player character as a lone operator going into hostile environments with a mission that they accomplish on their own in the field.
Before talking about this list holistically, I also want to mention one specific point which is more of a design attitude, or a contract with the player than a specific individual feature. This is the idea of verisimilitude3 and completeness: elements of the environment incorporate rich behavior pervasively. The design aims for a world model without "gaps" of expected interaction. If there's both puddles of water and a gun that shoots lightning, the player can safely expect that shooting the lightning gun into water will electrocute everyone in it. If you can light things on fire and throw objects around, you should be able to propagate fire between objects.
Things behave in ways that are consistent (all like things have like behavior), comprehensive (all things have all expectable relevant behaviors), and verisimilitudinous (all behaviors are legible representations of real-world referents).
Because actually implementing this principle is really, really hard, immersive sims often have individual exceptions or misses in achieving it. But their design points in that direction, if that makes sense. And I think this direction is that thematic center that unifies the genre; this idea of "lots of player affordances that point at rules-based systems, embodied in a design that aims at verisimilitude and completeness."
Which isn't to say that this sentence is a complete "definition" of immersive sims; I think all of the elements listed above are to some degree important to that core identity. The lone-operator theme and the sense of embodied presence, for example, are universal to the canon listed above and you could easily put them on the same level of importance as the idea of verisimilitude and completeness.
Classifying things by their features is always fraught, of course, because there's always going to be something you miss, or something that's borderline. One example is character progression systems; people tend to point to the abilities in Dishonored as an RPG-like feature, but they're actually fairly common. But they tend to take very different shapes; progression in Deus Ex, through things like the augmentation canisters, doesn't look much like progression in Dishonored. And Thief doesn't really have much of a progression system at all. So that feels much more like a borderline property of the genre – although of course, if you defined the canon differently, you'd get a different perspective on that. This definition isn't necessarily definitive, but it is at least somewhat systematic.
The mantle and crust
The 'mantle' of the genre, then, includes everything that's clearly within the genre but deviates in one or two ways, or simply isn't so obviously and universally regarded as an immersive sim as to make it into the core. Deathloop is an Arkane immersive sim that twists the formula a bit with its time loop conceit, making it almost a run-based game. Weird West ditches the first-person perspective and thus is lower on the "embodiment" characteristic of most of the genre, but it is very selfconsciously an immersive sim in most ways that count.
Hitman (2016) fits almost every feature listed above: it has a linear structure of individually open-ended levels (though replaying them is encouraged) driven by missions. It's about a lone operator going into a hostile environment. It has rich NPC behavior and various interlocking systems – including, yes, puddle electrocution. Perhaps the main thing that might make immersive sim purists tilt their heads is the game's reliance on scripted scenarios, but I'd argue that every script in Hitman is a scenario, that is, a set of initial conditions and rules for how they move towards various outcomes rather than simple "a thing that happens." The idea of verisimilitude and completeness seems to be present.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its sequel do count, I think. Most arguments to place them outside the genre are about those games' relative "complexity" or "depth". You could say that a wading pool is still a pool; or you could say those games gesture towards immersive sim ideas more than they actually enact them.
And then, even further out, you have the broad "crust" of genre blends, twists on these ideas, and games that are informed by immersive sims in their design but are radically different in structure or conception. Shadows of Doubt, for example, is an immersive sim in all but its superstructure – it's a procedural open world that the player navigates in totally self-directed ways, unlike the level-based structure of traditional immersive sims.
The first-person RPG genre is just as descended from Ultima Underworld as immersive sims are, and so the shared DNA manifests in phenotypic similarities that you can easily read as immersive sim influence, or even as those games being immersive sims – if you want to look at the genre expansively. Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and so on all feature stealth and combat, certain tropes of immersive sim interaction (like password locks and environmental clues to their solutions). But they don't necessarily aim towards that idea of completeness and verisimilitude; if you cast Lightning Bolt into one of Skyrim's rivers, you don't expect to electrocute all the fish. Similarly, games like Kings Field (and Lunacid) have that Underworld DNA but are not necessarily built around richly prevalent systems or environmental features.
Of course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a game in which you can electrocute fish. It seems hard to argue that the game isn't an immersive sim but for the fact that it's an open world and that it doesn't selfconsciously share design lineage with "0451 games".
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic has a lot of immersive sim ideas built into it, but it mostly plays like a straight action game in which kicking enemies into walls of spikes is a central mechanic. Similarly, Bioshock is more linear in its approach, and that series gets less immersive-sim-like as it goes. It's reasonably easy to argue that the original Bioshock is an immersive sim, albeit an action-oriented. It is, after all, a puddle-electrocuting game. But Bioshock Infinite is almost impossible to view as anything but a straight shooter with some funky special abilities the player can use.
Speaking of electrocuting puddles: is "Divinity 2: Original Sin", the ultimate puddle-management simulator, an immersive sim? Food for thought.
Always lurking in the background of immersive sims is the broader idea of an action-stealth genre, into which we can place basically every core immersive sim but also Far Cry, Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, Splinter Cell, and so on. The line does blur, here; does the Far Cry series acquire the immersive sim nature in Far Cry 2 and then immediately drop it?
My overarching point here is not to argue for the futility of definition, or to try and place any games (besides the canon at the start of this article) exactly in or out of the immersive sim genre. It is, rather, to point out that there are so few truly unambiguous immersive sims that the immersive sim genre does not really fulfill the typical role of genres in games culture. That is, it is not a marketing label you can use to readily find more similar games like the one that you liked; if we imagine the corpus of available video games as one gigantic store, the shelf labeled "Immersive Sims" barely exists. If you go on Steam and look at the "immersive sim" tag, you'll see basically no games that have anything of the immersive sim nature – rather, you'll see job simulators like Power Wash Simulator and Truck Simulator.
Many fans of the immersive sim genre have exhaustively played every game they think is an immersive sim, which is certainly not a feature of a normal genre!
Therefore, for immersive sims to be a truly useful concept, we have to think of them more as a broad cultural force in video games than as a specific canon of games – hence why it matters to list this broad "mantle" and "crust" of immersive sims, this wider space of games that have the immersive sim nature at some level even if not everyone is willing to fully place those games in that box.
Immersive sim ideas get used over and over again and permeate a surprisingly broad swath of games, even if a game everyone can agree Is An Immersive Sim only rarely seems to come out. Arguably4, the entire idea of entity component systems in game programming has the immersive sim nature.
I do want to go back to that core idea of verisimilitude and completeness. Games where things behave; things behave as you expect; things behave everywhere; things behave with each other. Centering that lens without entirely disregarding questions of structure (open levels, linear campaign) and embodiment, I'd propose a secondary canon of games that I do think are immersive sims:
- Hitman (2016) and its sequels;
- Deathloop;
- Shadows of Doubt;
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom;
- Far Cry 2 (and no other Far Cry);
- Weird West;
- Ultima Underworld;
This list is very debatable – purposefully radical, even. It is not meant to be a definition so much as one interpretation of the definition above. May this essay, then, be not an end to arguments but just a tanker full of gasoline crashing directly into the discourse. Forever and ever, amen.
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953.↩
For example, I didn't include Ultima Underworld because although almost everyone will agree it's an immersive sim, you could just as easily argue that it's prefiguring the genre rather than a part of it. I also omitted the newer Deus Ex games (I don't want to argue over whether they're "too streamlined" to really count) and Bioshock (idem). Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic seem to be widely considered either borderline or "imsim-inspired action games." Ultimately the point here, again, is not to be exactly comprehensive but to find a central canon that is very easy to agree on. Shout outs to the one person in my mentions earlier who emphatically doesn't think Dishonored is an immersive sim, who serves as a reminder that "easy" is relative.↩
Some of you may say that the use of the word "verisimilitude" here is a way of backdooring the idea of "simulation", but to that I say: shhhhh. It is if nothing else a way to avoid the baggage of "simulation". By verisimilitude, I mean, very literally, the quality of appearing to be like something real, a very broad sense of "realism" that incorporates, eg, fantastical settings where nevertheless things move and act according to an expected physicality and relations of cause and effect.↩
In the sense that I know saying this will generate arguments.↩